After a nationwide search performed by its Board of Trustees, East Lynne Theater Firm (ELTC) of Cape Might, N.J., has introduced that Craig Fols, an actor, director and playwright, has been named the corporate’s new creative director.
As solely the third creative director in ELTC’s 43-year historical past, Fols shall be liable for conceiving and implementing the creative imaginative and prescient and technique for ELTC, a nonprofit skilled theater devoted to selling, reimagining, and producing entertaining and thought-provoking American theater.
Says Fols, “I’m thrilled past phrases to return to Cape Might as ELTC’s creative director. My first encounter with the corporate was in 1997 after I noticed ELTC founder Warren Kliewer’s manufacturing of Rip Van Winkle on the outdated Franklin Road College. It was then that I fell in love with ELTC’s distinctive id and its work in resurrecting the American theater of the previous in lovely Cape Might. Gayle Stahlhuth refined that id over time by producing notable world premieres and up to date performs. Once I noticed ELTC’s manufacturing of Possessing Harriet final season, I fell in love with the theater firm over again. In partnership with ELTC’s supporters and workers, I stay up for honoring ELTC’s legacy and serving to to information it into the longer term.”
Provides Susan Tischler, president of the ELTC Board of Trustees, “We’re thrilled to welcome Craig to ELTC. Not solely is he a gifted artist, he additionally has nice respect for our longstanding mission of manufacturing basic American performs. Craig’s love for ELTC is barely underscored by his love for Cape Might. He’s the proper particular person to guide us into what will be an thrilling new chapter for East Lynne.”
Craig Fols first started placing on performs in his grandmother’s basement when he was 4 years outdated. Rising up in South Jersey, he created theater in grade faculty and the group and had his first one-act play printed by Eldridge Publishing Firm when he was 12.
At 15, he began getting performing gigs in Philadelphia, together with performing for 3 summers at LaSalle Music Theatre and for six-show weeks in Philadelphia dinner theaters. At 18, he studied and labored at Bob Hedley’s The Philadelphia Firm earlier than transferring to New York at age 19 to review performing at Circle within the Sq. on Broadway. Early performing credit embrace enjoying Colleen Dewhurst’s son in The Trials of Mrs. Surratt by Lanie Robertson. He additionally originated the position of Kenneth Halliwell in Nasty Little Secrets and techniques, first on the Walnut Road Theatre in Philadelphia and later at Main Phases in New York.
Whereas working at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, he started writing performs as an grownup. On his thirtieth birthday, he acted in his comedy Buck Easy at Theatre Membership Funambule on New York Metropolis’s Decrease East Facet. He went on to behave in that present at venues such because the La Mama Experimental Theatre Membership earlier than the play was printed in The Greatest American Brief Performs 1994-1995.
In 2001, his lengthy affiliation with The Musical of Musicals started whereas he was a author on the BMI Workshop. He first pitched the present to Jim Morgan, the manufacturing creative director of the York Theatre, and ultimately performed the Main Man off-Broadway for greater than 500 performances (Authentic Forged Album, Jay Data). Throughout this time, he carried out The Musical of Musicals for a lot of of his childhood heroes, together with John Kander and Fred Ebb, Harold Prince, Arthur Laurents, Carol Channing, and Stephen Sondheim. He subsequently directed his personal model of the present on the Walnut Road Theatre, the place he additionally performed the Villain.
Current work contains directing the Hank Williams bio No person Lonesome For Me on the American Heartland Theatre in Kansas Metropolis and growing his play A Story of Two Cities, Cobbled Collectively by the Brothers Lovejoy at Centenary Stage in North Jersey. As a author, he has obtained the Berilla Kerr Award, the BMI Basis’s Jerry Harrington Musical Theatre Award, and a residency at Edith Wharton’s The Mount in help of his musical The Age of Innocence. He has additionally been a frequent resident on the Edward Albee Basis in Montauk.
Cape Might theater audiences of East Lynne Theater Firm may even keep in mind him as Maxwell Davenport in The Late Christopher Bean in 2013.
Based in 1980, East Lynne Theater Firm (ELTC) was the primary theater within the nation with the distinctive mission of presenting and preserving America’s theatrical heritage. The New York Instances listed ELTC as one of many 75 prime summer season theaters in North America. In 2018, the New Jersey Senate and Normal Meeting handed a joint legislative decision recognizing ELTC as “one of many state’s most necessary cultural treasures.”